I have NO sin!"

Yesterday at work I was working with a quiet, tired patient when in wheeled a guy in an electric wheelchair. He had come to visit the patient on the other side of the room. Before he got very far my patient pointed at him and bellowed, "I have NO sin!" The guy in the wheelchair looked a little aghast and backed out of the room without comment. I said to my patient, "What was that all about?" He said, "I was just messing with him." Although I felt bad for the gentleman who had been messed with, I could not help but laugh.

I later told one of my many Christian coworkers about it, and she said, "Maybe the world is going to end in December after all." I don't know if she was offended by it. I was hoping she would find it amusing. I know Christians take their sin seriously though, and this is one of my huge problems with Christianity. I know what they say, but I fail to see the logic in how a god's sacrifice of himself to himself redeems humankind's "sin" for all of eternity? If I understand them correctly, and I am really trying to, I, a nonbeliever, am supposed to have faith that a guy who may have lived and died two thousand years ago caused himself to be brutally killed so that I will not suffer eternal separation from him because of, let's say, the entire decade of the 1980's? I don't even remember half... er... some of it. It is entirely baffling to me. I keep trying to understand it but I can't help feeling like I must have missed something. I was probably too busy sinning.

So basically 5000 years ago there were two nudists that followed bad advice from a talking snake and now I have to accept that because of that i have this affliction diagnosed by people who self-invested themselves with the title of gods representatives, who would otherwise be considered unimportant village idiots?

Paul, Serious question: Who cares what the "bible says"? From what I understand, a bunch of people (who collectively understood less about the way the world works than the average, modern-day 9-year-old) wrote a bunch of essentially unrelated texts which were then consolidated into what is called "The Bible". We're supposed believe that GOD actually wrote this "book" by dictating it to the human authors - right? How do we know that God wrote the Bible? Because God said so - in the Bible - which He wrote. Do I have this right?

It's always entertaining when the village Christian lays out the ol' sales pitch like nobody's heard it before.

Oh really Paul? I wasn't aware of the basic beliefs of your worldview. Now that I've heard it for the very first time ever, it makes total sense and I am convinced of its veracity. I have stopped being an ignorant atheist and have asked Jesus into my heart. Woooo!

Hey Paul. I don't really mean to come across snarky, for that I apologize. I once believed that narrative myself and vehemently defended it. I just wanted to say that the reason I walked away from it was because I had to apply the same integrity to my own beliefs as I did when I critiqued others for being the wrong ones. When I did that my unfounded beliefs didn't stand up when I used the same measuring stick that I measured people with different beliefs. Religion is the ultimate elephant in the room. And religious people always talk about the power of god, yet he doesn't really appear physically to people. I find it convenient that in the age when everyone has a camera attached to their phone there hasn't been one photo that can objectively be identified as a god revealing itself in the physical world. And how interesting it is that it's only through these certian people who self appoint themselves as gods representatives that tell the rest of us the nature of god, and that their god in particular is the right one. And religions have always constructed mechanisms to maintain their infallibility, so arguing against them has in the past has proven either deadly or disenfranchising to the person questioning. My comment about Christianity earlier wasn't to be totally confrontational, I'm simply pointing out the absurdities with total and unquestioning belief in this Eden story. Without the original sin story, Christianity is pointless and ultimately can't sell it's invisible product. The entire legitimacy of the religion rests on the historical and literal basis of the garden of Eden story. So outside the realm of fantasy and allegory, magic apples and talking snakes are reserved to people on psychedelic drugs. One word unravels the entire thing. ...dinosaurs... Don't say that god or satan or Zeus or Brian Boitano put the carcasses of dinosaurs here to test our faith. That requires a burden of proof greater than the creation story. The mental complexities an apologist has to come up with are an infinite regression of absurdities. I would propose that god didn't create men (women), rather that gods are creations of men. Please go read Carl Sagans "The Deamon Haunted World". Sagan will be infinitely more eloquent than I could be.